In this Brief Report, we describe an evaluation of and revisions to a rubric adapted from the Jacobs et al.'s (1981) ESL COMPOSITION PROFILE, with four rubric categories and 20-point rating scales, in the context of an intensive English program writing placement test. Analysis of 4 years of rating data (2016-2021, including 434 essays) using…

Assessing integrated reading-into-writing task performances is known to be challenging, and analytic rating scales have been found to better facilitate the scoring of these performances than other common types of rating scales. However, little is known about how specific operationalizations of the reading-into-writing construct in analytic rating…

Background: Research has shown that early identification of children with language issues is critical for effective intervention, and yet many children are not identified until school age. The use of parent-completed rating scales, especially in urban, minority populations, might improve early identification if parent ratings are found to be…

Performance assessments have become the norm for evaluating language learners' writing abilities in international examinations of English proficiency. Two aspects of these assessments are usually systematically varied: test takers respond to different prompts, and their responses are read by different raters. This raises the possibility of undue…

Accuracy in the scoring of writing is critical if standardized tasks are to be used in a national assessment scheme. Three approaches to establishing accuracy (i.e., consensus, consistency, and measurement) exist and commonly large-scale assessment programs of primary school writing demonstrate adjacent agreement consensus rates of between 80% and…